


the gravity of one living being

by medeadea



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, First Kiss, Introspection, Kinda, M/M, This Is Sappy As Hell, there is also a little bit of magic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-22
Updated: 2017-12-22
Packaged: 2019-02-18 12:49:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,044
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13100457
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/medeadea/pseuds/medeadea
Summary: Kei watches the long long sunrise over Venus in the bow of his ship. He thinks entirely too much.





	the gravity of one living being

**Author's Note:**

> For Disa over on tumblr for the Kurotsuki Gift Exchange.  
> Sorry that this is so late, Christmas caught up to me faster than I expected. I hope you like the sappiness :)

Kei is sitting in the light of dawn behind the solar panels when Kuroo finds him. After almost a year of living together on a cramped ship he knows the cadence of all his colleagues’ footfalls, and Kuroo’s especially. Kuroo halts, just a few steps away, probably leans against a beam in his usual slouch.

Behind the paneled dome the sun stands barely over the clouds of Venus, gives them a dusty rose colour. Its rise is too slow to observe, feels like there’s no movement at all, even though he knows that this is already the second time he’s watched dawn since they drifted into stationary orbit.

“Can’t sleep?” Kuroo asks, his voice soft.

Kei shrugs, already knows that this won’t be enough of an answer for Kuroo and sighs preemptively. He’s proven right when he hears the rustle of Kuroo pushing himself out of his slouch and stepping up to the panels. If he peers out of the corner of his eye he can see Kuroo’s blurry form, a black blot encroaching the poisonous clouds of sulphuric acid that span the entire horizon.

300 days on a ship together shouldn’t feel like much at all, but proximity does _things_ to people. Things Kei doesn’t necessarily appreciate, as is the case with their resident biologist, a man called Oikawa that drives Kei into a rage regularly and with glee.

With Kuroo it’s a different game altogether. Sometimes it feels like Kuroo is two people at once, a detail that Kei had noticed immediately upon their first meeting. Deeply passionate about his field of study and knowledgeable beyond his years but in his free time a flippant twaddler with an inclination for ill-timed flirtation. Kei doesn’t like to admit it, but Kuroo’s easy character makes living on the ship with the others a whole lot more pleasant.

_Not when I’m trying to find a moment of peace though_ , Kei thinks as Kuroo nudges his thigh with a soft boot.

“I’m not trying to sleep,” he says, lets his annoyance bleed into the words and pushes Kuroo’s foot away.

Kuroo apparently takes this as an invitation to tap the tip of his shoe against the metal of Kei’s artificial shin and Kei is about to snarl at him when Kuroo suddenly sinks down on the floor next to him.

“How’d you lose your leg?” he asks, apropos of nothing, after having known about the prosthesis since before he stepped foot inside Kei’s ship.

Kei squints at him, seeks for a motive, but Kuroo looks relaxed as always, leaning backwards on his hands, a mirror image of how he found Kei minutes ago.

“Car accident,” Kei mumbles, unwilling to say more on the subject. Not because it’s sore but because it’s unimportant. There are more interesting things to ask in a heart-to-heart in the middle of the night-cycle.

As if reading his thoughts Kuroo switches subjects. He does that a lot, actually. Guesses Kei’s thoughts.

“Since when did you know that you wanted to become an engineer?”

Scrunching his nose Kei looks towards the sun again. He searches himself, but can’t find any of his usual reluctance to answer personal questions. Most of the time they are posed as small talk, an opportunity for his conversational partner to jump into an essay on their own life, but not now, not with Kuroo. So he answers.

“Since I was eight. My brother was studying to be accepted by a good technical university and I wanted to join him some time. Didn’t work out though.”

Kuroo hums and nods.

“Which one’d you study at?”

“Delft,” Kei answers and can’t suppress a smirk. “Just fucked off far away enough to be left alone, which was pretty great. And the connections were good.”

Kuroo laughs. “I have to admit, I’ve no clue where that is but alright. How’d you end up back in Japan though?”

Kei twists his mouth. His patience is already running out again, and that where their conversation had started so well.

“I worked for ESA for two years and then got offered a better position with JAXA. _And_ I’m pretty fucking sure you know this already.”

And that’s about all he wants to say about the subject for the next hundred days. He pulls his knees up, wraps his arms around them and rests his chin on his left knee.

Kuroo lets out a sigh but stays quiet otherwise.

The silence that falls over them is surprisingly companionable, unlike those awkward moments between the crew when Kei has once again been harsher than expected with them for some reason or other. Seriously, if they’d just all do their job without unnecessarily messing around he wouldn’t have to, but he can only tolerate being constantly underestimated for his age so many times in one day cycle.

And again it’s Kuroo that helps with those moments, like he helps with so many parts of Kei’s life recently. He’s the one to lighten the mood, too often by making Kei _understand_ , because he’s not just knowledgeable in all things alien intelligence, but also excellent at saying just the right thing at the right time. Or _not_ saying it.

Sometimes their camaraderie chafes at Kei and he’s annoyed that he knows exactly why. He didn’t come to Venus for romantic entanglements. In fact that is the direct opposite of why he’s here. And yet.

He watches Kuroo from the corner of his eye, something he knows he’s been doing far too often to go unnoticed, but Kuroo is looking through the solar panels now, face bathed in powder pink and calm. It doesn’t really make any sense, that they make each other calm, or maybe Kuroo is usually even more–

No, Kuroo is a sociable person. On occasion excited, often intense but always gracious in his dealings with their colleagues. Kei on the other hand has little patience for nonsense and he knows that sometimes this makes him blind to solutions to many of his problems.

Calm—in the presence of another person—they are only with each other.

It’s probably only a few minutes later that his backside starts to hurt from the cramped position Kei is sitting in, but it feels like much longer. How is it that one feels so much closer to somebody else when neither of them says anything? They aren’t even touching, by all rights this should be one of the most awkward moments of Kei’s life.

He’s about to flee from the awkwardness he fears Kuroo is experiencing when Kuroo nudges his shoulder against Kei’s and grins at him. Then he just lays his head on Kei’s shoulder like it’s the coziest pillow and closes his eyes.

They’ve never been this close before. Kei’s heart drops into his stomach for a second. He can feel Kuroo breathe and it’s making his own breath come flat and short and slightly panicked and Kuroo’s rat’s nest of a hairdo tickles the skin of his neck and jaw and his shoulder presses against Kei’s shoulder blade and he can _smell_ him and it feels _so_ _good_.

It’s unexpected, the wave of well-being that washes over him with Kuroo’s contact. If he thinks about it it makes sense, but shit, he has very studiously _not_ been thinking about it, so of course it’d catch him off guard. It’s what Kuroo always manages to do to Kei and now he wonders how Kuroo does it, keeps surprising him, because in hindsight Kuroo’s actions describe a clear line like pearls on a cord.

Maybe it’s time to think forward instead of back.

Kuroo is always there, somewhere in the recesses of Kei’s mind. The way he looks: tall, almost as tall as Kei himself is, but sturdier; fingers long with big knuckles, tattoos and markings crawling up his neck from the collar of their standard issue flight suits. The way he walks: deceptively slow, like he has infinite time at his hands, and quiet, as if he fears the impact of his steps will disturb something from below their ship to come and eat them.

For all Kei knows it might, but it’s not his job to think about that so he tries not to. So far they only found harmless micro-AI in the atmosphere of this terribly uninhabitable planet and nothing shows signs of life on a bigger scale.

It’s _Kuroo’s_ job to care about and he excels at it. Kei has never before seen someone with as much passion for alien intelligence, the life unknown, so strange that it may not even be called life at all. He’d like to have more time to watch Kuroo work, to see that facet of Kuroo that’s so focused, full of curiosity and thirst for knowledge. It’s when he’s his most beautiful.

Because Kuroo _is_ beautiful, inside and out, and Kei is caught in his gravity, orbits him like a planet a star and he absolutely needs to stop this clichéd chain of thought before he implodes with disgust at himself and everything he ever was and ever will be.

So he unclenches, turns towards Kuroo slowly, dislodging Kuroo’s head from his shoulder carefully without making them lose their balance. Kuroo looks at him, brows lifted slightly, his expression open and soft.

The tips of Kei’s fingers find Kuroo’s jaw, slide over his smooth skin light as a feather and he can’t bear to look Kuroo in the eyes suddenly, so he follows the path of his fingers. He sees the corner of Kuroo’s mouth curve up the slightest bit, and more when he touches it with his thumb. He catches the tiny flare of Kuroo’s nostrils when he comes closer and everything is so so slow, as if time itself didn’t feel like running along anymore. Kuroo’s eyes flutter shut in slow motion, his dark lashes blurry because they are so close and why is Kei still keeping his eyes open when he can’t see anything clearly anymore, that doesn’t make any sense.

Then they’re kissing, slightly misaligned, and Kuroo’s lips are softer than a peach and his hands are at Kei’s nape and Kei can’t concentrate on anything anymore, all the sensations are streaming into his mind in one huge tangle impossible to sort.

Kuroo’s cheek is still soft under Kei’s hand and he slides it back, into Kuroo’s long hair and now he can press closer, feel Kuroo next to him better, his arms around Kei’s shoulders, the way he bites Kei’s lip, slides his nose next to Kei’s and scratches his fingernails through Kei’s hair and makes his whole body shiver. Kei can smell Kuroo so close, the soap they all use and his skin and even his hair and it’s clouding his brain as if he’d stuck his head into the deceptively still looking clouds of Venus under them.

He licks at Kuroo’s lip and can feel his smile form, along with the vibrations from Kuroo’s pleased hum that makes him bold, press forward ever further. Kuroo presses back until he suddenly doesn’t, suddenly only clings to Kei’s neck and the only thing holding them upright is Kei’s hand on the floor behind Kuroo.

When Kei opens his eyes, he can barely make out the surprised expression on Kuroo’s face, but he hears his foot scramble for a hold. It’s way too complicated.

He lowers them to the ground, keeps his hand behind Kuroo’s head until they’re lying almost on top of each other. His elbow rests next to Kuroo’s head and it’s not so hard to look at Kuroo anymore now that his eyes are only half open and his breath is coming short and his heart is rabbiting along with Kei’s.

It’s when he sees the corners of Kuroo’s eyes deepen into tiny wrinkles that Kei notices he is smiling and Kuroo is smiling in return.

It makes kissing strange, their lips too tight so the smiles quickly disappear again, but the feeling stays. The swoop of a blast off in Kei’s stomach, that feeling of gravity not wanting to let him go into space and the unbearable attraction of a new planet.

Except this time the planet is a man. Kei can’t for the life of him find a fault in that.


End file.
